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Arabs are equally emphatic that Israel must give up some occupied territory—and give it up soon. In Jeddah last week, where they gathered under the auspices of Saudi Arabia's King Khalid, representatives of 40 Islamic nations approved a resolution to expel Israel from the U.N. General Assembly for foot-dragging on withdrawal and refusing to deal with the Palestinians. Anwar Sadat flies to Kampala, Uganda, next week for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity, at which motions similar to the one adopted in Jeddah will be introduced—but probably voted down. Many black African nations are annoyed because Arab oil states have raised prices but given them inadequate help to combat the resulting inflation; they also lament the loss of Israeli technical-aid programs that they had cut off to demonstrate their solidarity with the Arabs.
Another anti-Israeli resolution will surface—and will probably be approved—at a meeting of nonaligned nations next month in Lima, Peru. Actually, it seems unlikely that Israel could be thrown out of the U.N. entirely, since the U.S. is committed to cast a Security Council veto to prevent that from happening. But Israel could be suspended from the General Assembly as South Africa was last year.
Ominous Precedent. At week's end the big unanswered question was whether Egypt would go ahead with its threat and demand the removal of the U.N. troops in the Sinai. The whole problem of ending the mandate, as one Israeli diplomat in Jerusalem put it, is "a plate of legal spaghetti." Legally, the U.N. Security Council supervises both the peace-keeping forces in the Sinai and the observers on the Golan Heights, and last week Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim began summoning Council members to discuss how the mandate could be kept alive. Practically speaking, however, the U.N. troops could not remain in place if one side demanded their ouster. If they were forced out by Egypt, the situation could be ominous—and there is a disturbing precedent. In May 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded a similar pullout of U.N. forces for their own safety in the face of "Israeli aggression" and Egyptian defensive moves. The late Secretary-General U Thant complied. Eighteen days later, the Six-Day War erupted. The Israelis were betting that Cairo would back down, partly because of fail-safe ambiguities in Fahmy's letter, partly because they are convinced that Egypt is not remotely prepared for another war. Jerusalem even suspected that Fahmy was a straw man setting up the issue so that Sadat could knock it down.